Horace Pippin’s Modernism

About the Class

Horace Pippin (1888–1946) took classes at the Barnes in the late 1930s, participated in its intellectual and cultural community, and is the only African American artist whose work is exhibited in the collection. For Dr. Barnes, Pippin’s status as a “self-taught artist” fit within his modernist framework, in that the collector wanted to support and display art that he believed to be uniquely local, authentic, and American. He also believed that Pippin’s art could inspire future American modern artists, describing it as possessing “the charm, simplicity, sincerity and naive characteristic of all authentic folk art.”

This course will return to the galleries where Pippin studied, and where his art now hangs, to explore some of the complexities and contradictions in his works that often went unseen in his own time. Through art historical research and careful looking, we will examine a broader range of modernist issues that Pippin engaged with. We will study how the artist handled a variety of formal and conceptual concerns; from processing the traumas of World War I and II, to using pop-culture source materials, to subverting dominant visual tropes of American slavery, to anticipating the new audiovisual language of television, to the impact of his own study of modern art in the Barnes galleries.

The class is online-only. More about online classes.

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Barnes classes will:

• Sharpen your observational and critical thinking skills.
• Improve your ability to communicate about art.
• Deepen your appreciation for cultures and histories outside your own.

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